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4-01-2006 Scotsman Terror on the cheap killed 52 bombing victims By Gethin Chamberlain Chief News Correspondent THE cost of staging a suicide bombing in a major city has fallen dramatically since the attacks on the United States in 2001, with the 7 July bombers in London, who took 52 lives, spending only a few hundred pounds to commit their atrocities. A study, for the BBC World Service, also suggested that Mohammad Sidique Khan, the suspected ringleader of London bombers, had been its main financial backer and gave money to the other men to buy materials. Some had made preparations for their deaths by paying off debts; at least one had written a will. The cost of the attacks - which is disputed by other analysts - is markedly lower than the estimated GBP 8,500 for the Madrid bombings and a tiny fraction of the GBP 420,000 spent by al-Qaeda on the 11 September attacks on the US. The report estimated that al-Qaeda had spent less than GBP 42,000 on each of its major attacks since then. Loretta Napoleoni, the author of Terror Inc and Insurgent Iraq, said the low cost of the London operation showed how terrorism had evolved since 2001. "This is part of a pattern," she said. "What a lot of the new groups are doing is taking 9/11 as a blueprint and applying it to whatever their financial circumstances are. "The London operation was done by a group of friends who were not linked to any organisation. These individuals are suicide bombers, and their impact is enormous. The impact 7/7 had across the world is almost as big as 9/11, and it cost nothing." According to the BBC report, investigators believed that, of the four bombers, Khan, who worked as a teaching assistant, had access to the most money. He died in the attacks along with the other three suspected bombers: Hasib Hussain, an unemployed 18-year-old; Germaine Lindsey, 19, and Shehzad Tanweer, 22, who helped out at his family's fish and chip shop. Police in London have said the four used inexpensive, peroxide-based explosives. A United Nations report in 2004 said measures taken to choke off al-Qaeda's funding had only "limited impact" in preventing terrorist attacks. Some analysts dispute the BBC report's financial conclusions. Professor Paul Wilkinson, one of Britain's most respected terrorism experts, suggested that the assessment of the bombers' financial outlay covered only the cost of building the bombs and travelling to London to detonate them, while it ignored the significant expenses incurred in the preparation period. The financial cost of the final stages of the attack - of building the bombs and then travelling to London - is likely to have been relatively low. But at least two of the bombers are thought to have visited Pakistan in the months before the attack, while Khan and the Aldgate bomber, Tanweer, also attended a whitewater rafting trip in north Wales only weeks beforehand. Counting these trips as preparation for the bombings could increase the estimated cost of mounting the attacks. "It is low cost to carry out this sort of attack, I think most of us are aware of that, although the public may think it costs more," Prof Wilkinson said. "But this does not take into account the time it took to gain the information needed; it doesn't taken into account the build-up of the cell and the cost of going to south Asia. I don't think it was just accidental that they ended up in Pakistan, so I think it will be more expensive than the report implies." A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "Financial factors are among many lines of inquiry being pursued by the ongoing Metropolitan Police investigation into the terrorist explosions of 7 July in London. "It would seem that elements of the terrorist plan would not have themselves been financially expensive. However, the wider circumstances of how the attack was funded and conducted are yet to be fully established and are being actively investigated. "At this point, it is therefore not possible to give a meaningful estimate for the total financial cost of mounting the attack." The Home Office is due to publish what it has described as a "narrative" of the events leading up to the 7 July bombings later this year and the security services are braced for embarrassing revelations about their failure to spot the gang's activities before they struck. In the meantime, the team investigating the attacks is still trying to put together the missing pieces of the jigsaw. Prof Wilkinson, of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews, said he believed investigators were now sure that the bombers were not only linked with the perpetrators of the failed attack two weeks later, but had also received assistance and training from al-Qaeda in Pakistan. "There are lots of people in politics who would like to think that there was no outside help, but I think the international links are very likely to exist," he said. "I think you can say conclusively that this was an al-Qaeda attack." He also said it was unlikely the two bomb teams were the only ones to have been recruited. Meanwhile, a new poster campaign to maintain public vigilance in London was launched by Scotland Yard yesterday. One of the posters warns that terrorists could use the River Thames either to mount an attack or as a means of moving materials or conducting reconnaissance, and it urges anyone who lives or works on the river to be alert to the threat.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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